Nigel & Cain: Your thoughts on this?

[The Good Reverend Roger]

Of course, then you have people like RWHN, who is basically in the pocket of ALEC and has an inordinate degree of faith in "the establishment". I'm sure that in his eyes the official reports sound completely watertight and we're just a bunch of off-the-wall loonies for being skeptical.

Not sure about that last bit.  RWHN seems more interested in MAKING PEOPLE GET IN LINE than he does in defending weird shit like this.

Yeah, but I'm sure he's rolling his eyes at our speculations, because DUH, the OFFICIAL REPORTS are OFFICIAL.

Police are always honest about this sort of thing.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Most people would prefer to believe in fantastical conspiracy theories involving aliens, Nazi zombies, secret societies stretching back to the dawn of time and occult powers gaining sinister control over our lives.  Also reptilians, Muslims, JOOS etc.

Unfortunately for them, most conspiracies involve power, money and embarassment.  Why did the CIA attempt to kill Castro so many times?  Power and money.  Why did no-one come forward about Jimmy Savile, despite common knowledge of his crimes? Embarassment and power.  Why did Bush redact certain key parts of the 9-11 Commission's findings, specifically to do with Saudi Arabia?  Embarassment and money and power.

Also, real conspiracies are inevitably depressing.  The spectre of alien invaders attacking us from inside the hollow earth is far more exciting than the truth that the government sometimes pays its intelligence agencies to infiltrate terrorist organizations and then allow them to continue killing because it suits certain status quo political objectives.  Especially when you look at the list of people who have died by talking about alien invaders (practically none) versus all the judges and top law enforcement officials, many with personal bodyguards, who died while investigating actual conspiracies.

Yep. It's all terribly human, mundane, and predictable by virtue of being the entirety of history.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Of course, then you have people like RWHN, who is basically in the pocket of ALEC and has an inordinate degree of faith in "the establishment". I'm sure that in his eyes the official reports sound completely watertight and we're just a bunch of off-the-wall loonies for being skeptical.

Not sure about that last bit.  RWHN seems more interested in MAKING PEOPLE GET IN LINE than he does in defending weird shit like this.

Yeah, but I'm sure he's rolling his eyes at our speculations, because DUH, the OFFICIAL REPORTS are OFFICIAL.

Police are always honest about this sort of thing.

Well, they're authorities. So of course they are.

[insideout]

Evan Ebel, the kid that was shot in Texas for this, was the son of Jack Ebel, a longtime friend of Governor Hickenlooper.

I guess that could just be a coincidence, but I think it's pretty bizarre.

source: http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-201_162-57576163/hundreds-honor-slain-colorado-prisons-chief-tom-clements/

Evan was a member of the 211's, a white supremacist prison gang.  A perfect person/group to pin this on.

I can easily see it as a message: "See, Governor?  you can't win against us.  we can get to your specially appointed lieutenants, and we can even get to the kids of your friends.  You are not safe..."

[Cain]

Hmmm.

Looking into the 211s now.  Colorado based....apparently got no ties to any other white supremacist groups whatsoever.  That's odd.  Founded in 1995, specialized in racketeering, drugs and arms sales, robbery....hmm, and bribery according to the ADL, though it doesn't say of who or what.

The theory is being floated that the killing was committed by the 221s in response to the DoC shuffling members around the Colorado Prison system in an attempt to disrupt the gang.  However, the DoC has denied that it has specifically targeted the 211 gang in this way.

Further evidence comes from a former prisoner and anti-gang activist:

More comments undercutting the prisoner-shift hypothesis were offered to the station by Terrance Roberts, an ex-prisoner and former Westword profile subject who founded the anti-gang initiative Prodigal Son. "They break up bible study groups in prisons," he told the station. "I had a bible study group in Fremont and they sent me to another prison. If you're in prison you can expect to do 20 years at one particular prison or you can do a two-year sentence and be at four different penitentiaries."

Source: http://blogs.westword.com/latestword/2013/03/tom_clements_murder_211_prison_gang_motive.php

Based on multiple sources, the 211s did order hits, and successfully carried them out on the outside...but their code was broken by police in 2005, which resulted in Benjamin Davis, the group's leader, being put away.

Looks like the gang had some sway over the prison staff as well:

Howard didn't tell the whole squalid story. He didn't mention the evidence of staff involvement with the gang that made his efforts to seek protection even dicier. He didn't go into how, once he finally started "naming names," as prison investigators demanded, they accused him of crying rape to cover up his own criminal activities. He barely referred to his last day as a Colorado prisoner, when, he says, he was put in a cell with one of the gang leaders and sexually assaulted again.

A lot of people are taking Howard seriously these days. Since his talk in Washington a year ago, he's emerged as a highly visible "survivor speaker" for Just Detention International, a nonprofit active in the campaign to stop sexual abuse in prison, and a caustic critic of Colorado's DOC and its treatment of rape victims. Last summer he settled a civil-rights lawsuit against several DOC officials for $165,000.

The settlement came as Howard's attorneys were seeking a hearing to investigate how and why the Colorado Attorney General's Office had failed for years to produce a critical document in the case — a 2005 entry in Howard's inmate file that corroborated his claims of seeking help and being ignored. The document, which only surfaced after a private law firm got involved in the defense of a second Howard lawsuit, also casts doubt on the veracity of several sworn affidavits filed by case managers and supervisors claiming that Howard never told them that he was being threatened and extorted.

[Cain]

Er, going back to our Muslim suspect, the Daily Mail of all places has some interesting information:

Al-Turki, a well-known member of Denver's Muslim community, was convicted in state court in 2006 of unlawful sexual contact by use of force, theft and extortion and sentenced to 28 years to life in prison.

Prosecutors said al-Turki kept a housekeeper a virtual slave for four years in his home and sexually assaulted her. A judge reduced the sentence to eight years to life.

Al-Turki insisted the case was politically motivated. He owned a company that some years ago sold The Lives of the Prophets CDs, a series of incendiary sermons recorded by Anwar al-Awlaki, killed in a drone strike in Yemen in 2011.

Al-Turki's conviction angered Saudi officials and prompted the US State Department to send Colorado Attorney General John Suthers to Saudi Arabia to meet with King Abdullah, Crown Prince Sultan and al-Turki's family.

Anonymous sources have told Fox31 Denver that al-Turki's influential relatives in Saudi Arabia have long been putting pressure on Colorado officials to send him back home.

Now that, to me, is interesting.

Influential Saudi royal family members involved in the case, the State Department and Anwar al-Walaki.

Where have we come across this potentially deadly mix before?  Well, practically everywhere in the past few years, to be fair, but especially in the aftermath of 9/11.

We have an influential member of the Denver Muslim community, who has serious pull back in his home country and listens to the sermons of one Anwar al-Walaki.   Al-Walaki was in contact with suspected Saudi intelligence agent Omar al-Bayoumi while under FBI surveillance in 2000.  Al-Bayoumi helped two of the 9/11 hihackers obtain driver's licenses, rides to Social Security, and information on flight schools.  Just before meeting with the two, Al-Bayoumi had a closed door meeting at the Saudi Consulate in Los Angeles.  Anwar al-Walaki apparently arranged flights for Mohammed Atta between Washington DC and Miami in 2001.

Not saying any of the latter has to to with the former, I'm only noting the specific interesting linkages that have historically existed between the Saudi Royal Family, Anwar al-Walaki and insufficiently explained deaths.

So, is this Al-Turki part of the Saudi doublegame in the USA?  He's in an influential position in the Denver Muslim community, and seems to be sympathetic to certain extremist modes of Islam, and has friends in the Saudi government.

Obviously, this speculation isn't enough to provide a motive, not on it's own.  But I think I'm going to start looking into the Colorado drugs scene a little bit more...

[Cain]

Huh, how odd.

http://www.boingboing.net/2007/03/30/tsa_missed_90_of_bom.html

Undercover agents were able to slip bombs and IEDs past the Transport Security Agency checkpoint at Denver airport 90 percent of the time. Last time I was in Denver, the eagle-eyed agent was able to spot and confiscate my toothpaste, and of course, my suitcase arrived damaged, contents filthy, having been pawed at by a TSA goon and then improperly closed. These eagle-eyed guardians of freedom are so obsessed with making sure that we're all sharing our foot-funguses with each other on while our shoes go through the X-ray machine that they can't actually find actual bombs.

But I'm getting off track here.  Back to Clements.

[LMNO]

This is all making me feel like I'm down the rabbit hole.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

This is all making me feel like I'm down the rabbit hole.

HAH!  You were BORN down the rabbit hole.  We all were.

We're just learning that there might be another possible state of existence.

[Anna Mae Bollocks]

I want to MAKE everybody read this thread.
They'd just rationalize everything, though.